Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online Page B

electoral minimum) to agree on the best players of all time. There had been no real surprises in 1939. Rogers Hornsby, Rube Waddell, and other near runners-up, it was assumed (correctly), would be chosen in subsequent elections. No one knew when elections would be held, though; the Hall left that up to the BBWAA.
    In addition to the thirteen players elected by the writers in 1939, Commissioner Landis and a committee of baseball executives and insiders chose thirteen “pioneers” and “builders of baseball.” They included Spalding, Chadwick, and Cartwright; former National League president Morgan G. Bulkeley (who had also been a member of the Mills Commission) and former American League president Ban Johnson; managers Connie Mack and John McGraw; George Wright, star shortstop of the first all-professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings (his brother, Harry, was inducted as a manager in 1953); Charlie Comiskey (later the owner of the Chicago White Sox), Cap Anson, Buck Ewing, Candy Cummings (often credited with inventing the curve ball), and Hoss Radbourn, a pitcher who once won 60 games in a single season (and who later died of syphilis).
    So, from the beginning there were two gates to the Hall of Fame, one guarded by the writers, the other by a committee of insiders appointed by the Hall’s board of directors. This two-track system is still in place, and so is the requirement that candidates receive 75 percent of the relevant votes.
    In the winter of 1939, the writers held a special election for the purpose of inducting Lou Gehrig, who had fallen fatally ill. They didn’t vote again until 1942, when they selected Rogers Hornsby, then took World War II off. Between 1946 and 1950, they chose seven more: Carl Hubbell, Frankie Frisch, Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane, Herb Pennock, Pie Traynor, and Charlie Gehringer. All these BBWAA picks were obvious, except perhaps Pennock, who benefited—as Lefty Gomez and other Yankees would later—from the publicity that comes from playing in New York. On the whole, the BBWAA did its part in keeping Cooperstown an exclusive and prestigious club. *
    The same can’t be said for the Veterans Committee. In the summer of 1944, Commissioner Landis expanded it to six members and then proceeded to die. At his funeral, the assembled committee members voted Landis into Cooperstown, installing him in the baseball firmament while he was still standing in line at the pearly gates. In the commissioner’s (corporeal) absence, Connie Mack, a baseball elder whose managerial prowess and great dignity made him one of the Hall’s first elected members, became the dominant voice on the committee. The following year, he and his colleagues went on a spree, choosing ten old-timers, and followed with eleven more in 1946. More than half of these inductees were, as it turned out, Irish: Bresnahan, Collins, Jennings, Delahanty, Duffy, Kelly, O’Rourke, Brouthers, Robinson, Clarke, McCarthy, and McGinnity—the new immortals sounded like a roll call at a meeting of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
    This wasn’t simple ethnic favoritism. Irish players dominated the nineteenth-century game as Latinos rule today, for many of the same economic and cultural reasons. But it also didn’t hurt that Connie Mack’s real name was Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy.
    The dump of 1945–46 changed the balance of the Hall. In a stroke, it became less exclusive, less familiar to modern fans (al-most no one had ever actually seen the old-timers play), and less logical. *
    Connie Mack was one of the great baseball men of all time. Lawrence Ritter was an academic economist without any real baseball experience. But in the sixties and early seventies, Ritter’s influence over the Veterans Committee’s choices was almost as great as Mack’s had been.
    In 1966, Ritter published The Glory of Their Times, an oral history of baseball. He took a tape recorder, put it in front of twenty-two men who had played in the majors between